lisp editors for sun workstations?

"bryan_kramer.TORHO" at xerox.com "bryan_kramer.TORHO" at xerox.com
Thu Nov 24 00:45:35 AEST 1988


To users of lisp on suns:

I have Sun Common Lisp (LUCID) and am unhappy with the editors available
(lucid emacs and spe).  Does anyone have/know of better tools?  If so,
could you please tell me how / where to get them?

An ideal editor would be based on principles from the Xerox Lisp (now
en.vos) sedit.  As a matter of fact, an editor based on SUN's textedit
with the following constraints/features would do the trick:

a) typing a left parenthesis automatically puts in a right parenthesis
after the insertion point.

b) parentheses cannot be deleted by themselves (ie. only selected lisp
structures or characters in symbols and strings can be deleted.)

c) selecting a parenthesis selects the entire appropriate lisp structure

d) extending a selection extends only over valid lisp structures

e) builtin (ie fast) commands for parenthesizing and removing parentheses
from selections are necessary.

f) a command for opening a new editor or buffer on the definition of a
selected atom is necessary. 

g) a substitute command is necessary

h) some lisp auto-indent/pretty printing

All of the above would have to be smart about comments, strings, \ and |.

The point is, of course, that almost all editting would be done with the
mouse and the delete, put, and get keys.  

I like the idea of editting in a file with a small C program that does not
pull in all of LISP (so swapping in 8MB doesn't become an issue as it is
in SPE).

It doesn't really sound like much work if one had a week and access to the
source for text canvases or some good editor.

Thanks in advance
Bryan M. Kramer
Xerox Canada Inc.



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